Pages

Friday, 9 December 2016

Hobby butterfly - or why does my gaming life never feel quite satisfied?

Look out folks, here's a random musing incoming!

Let's be honest, my life is pretty good. I have a wife that doesn't mind me partaking in my hobby, so long as I don't leave it around too much of the house, 2 kids, the elder of which is capable of and willing to make appropriately impressed noises when she sees models I've painted. We have a house, a dog and a cat and we earn enough money to get by and still do some nice things.

40k I believe is in pretty good hands - my club avoids the worst excesses that are possible so games are usually pretty evenly matched and fun, GW seems to be grasping that their attitude over the last few years hasn't been conducive to a good relationship with their customers, specialist games are beginning to make a comeback, my painting is better than it ever has been and the models are the best that have ever been produced.

So why do I feel frustrated?

The above picture I think captures the problem precisely.

I'm not kidding anyone, most of my collection is 40k stuff, but here are the other games that I play.
30k
Bloodbowl
Necromunda
Magic the Gathering
Star Trek:Attack Wing

not to mention those I'd be interested in trying if the funds allowed
Godslayer
Cutlass
HALO Fleet Battles
Gates of Antares

I realise that might be quite a small sample in relation to some out there, but add in to that consideration the aforementioned family, kids, dog, cat, job etc plus the normal stuff like watching some tv with the wife etc and there's so little apparent time available that each week I'm having to make a series of decisions over what to concentrate on, what to play and what to pay attention to.

Bloodbowl has recently made the big jump back into my life again - now it never really went away with the games from cyanide and the occasional leagues I managed to organise at club, but the re-release of the game has a lot of people a lot more interested than ever before. At my club alone, the league I am currently running has 40% of its participants having never played in a league before, and 30% having never played the game at all beyond one or two matches.

Being a league commissioner also takes its own toll, time needs to be devoted before and after games to catch up with everyone else's matches, updating the league spreadsheet etc. (I've tried online league management software but it didn't really work that well for us).

Don't get me wrong, it's a great problem to have, but after every hobby session I feel slightly underwhelmed, either because I've lost (ok, not a new concept) or because whilst the game I played was fun, it was over entirely too quickly and another week has passed without playing whatever other games are on my mind at the time.

At this point, I have to confess that there's no real point to this article, I don't have some grand answer to the problem, and I'm just gonna have to suck it up and get over the fact that because of all the things I want to do, I'm not going to have time to give as much as I'd like to each of them.

Of course a lottery win would be nice so that I could retire and not have all those worries, but I guess I'd need to buy a ticket first...